Changing business needs over time may result in the creation of complex, inflexible application architectures, often with high levels of redundancy of business functions and data. To ensure that business needs drive information technology (IT) solutions,
Many organizations desire to break down application “silos”, wherein the deployment of multiple IT systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), data warehouses, customer portals and content management systems results in incomplete and inconsistent pictures of corporate information and project or group-specific business functions. More particularly, it is desired to increase focus on building IT integration capabilities to develop and deploy shareable and reusable services that may be used across lines of business and across processes in a manner dictated by business needs and not by the application or information technology (IT) architecture.
Organizations are increasingly turning to service-oriented architecture (SOA) methods, systems and models to develop and deploy shareable and reusable services, and adopting SOA models requires an effective SOA governance process. Governance is the underlying foundation of organizational transformation and managing an enterprise around its various initiatives. A well-defined governance model that enables a transformation defines the outcome of the initiatives undertaken by the enterprise. The defined governance model impacts the processes and entities that come under the purview of the transformation and, in addition, may impact others that play no role in the immediate transformation.
Existing IT governance processes are not focused on sharing or deploying solutions across lines of business, rather current IT governance processes are narrowly focused on the deployment of specific IT solutions. Additionally, existing governance processes are not concerned with the lifecycle of a solution, but are concerned with an initial deployment within a specific business area. In an SOA environment, the goal of an SOA governance process is to promote sharing of services across lines of business and the services lifecycle management is a critical element of the governance function to ensure that business processes don't break as updates or new versions of services are made available. However, current SOA Governance models are deficient in managing service orientation aspects of business to IT strategies, and insufficient for the adoption of service orientation through SOA across an entire enterprise.